The Art of Creating Technical Debt Intentionally

The Art of Creating Technical Debt Intentionally

Picture this: you’re racing against a deadline that’s approaching faster than a caffeinated squirrel. Your team could build the “perfect” solution… in about three weeks. Or you could ship a functional version tomorrow by strategically cutting corners. Welcome to the art of intentional technical debt—where smart shortcuts become superpowers rather than sins. Unlike accidental code messes born from midnight coding sessions (#Guilty), intentional technical debt is a conscious trade-off—a calculated gamble that buys you runway today while scheduling cleanup for tomorrow....

October 25, 2025 · 4 min · 756 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Why Your Software Doesn't Always Need to Scale

Why Your Software Doesn't Always Need to Scale

Not every piece of software needs to be a distributed system running on Kubernetes across three continents. I know, I know—that’s practically heresy in 2025. But hear me out. I’ve watched too many talented engineers spend months architecting elaborate microservices infrastructures for applications that serve 500 daily active users. I’ve seen startups burn cash on horizontal scaling solutions when a beefy vertical scale would’ve solved their problems for a year. And I’ve definitely been guilty of this myself....

October 25, 2025 · 10 min · 1952 words · Maxim Zhirnov
PostgreSQL vs MySQL in 2025: The Complete Practitioner's Guide to Choosing Your Database Weapon

PostgreSQL vs MySQL in 2025: The Complete Practitioner's Guide to Choosing Your Database Weapon

When I started my career, choosing between PostgreSQL and MySQL felt like picking between two identical twins wearing different colored shirts. Now, after years of wrestling with both in production environments, I can tell you: they’re cousins, not twins. And understanding the differences isn’t just trivia—it’s the difference between a system that scales gracefully and one that collapses under its own weight at 3 AM. Let me walk you through this comparison in a way that actually matters for real-world projects....

October 24, 2025 · 9 min · 1776 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Ethical Hacking: Should Companies Hire Ex-Blackhat Programmers? A Deep Dive into the Ultimate Security Gamble

Ethical Hacking: Should Companies Hire Ex-Blackhat Programmers? A Deep Dive into the Ultimate Security Gamble

There’s a peculiar paradox in modern cybersecurity that keeps CISO’s up at night. You know who understands how to break into your system better than anyone? The person who’s already done it. Illegally. For profit. Possibly while wearing a hoodie in their mom’s basement (okay, that last part might be a stereotype). The question of whether organizations should hire reformed blackhat hackers has become one of the most polarizing debates in cybersecurity circles....

October 24, 2025 · 10 min · 1973 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Embracing Chaos: The Art of Fluid Software Architecture

Embracing Chaos: The Art of Fluid Software Architecture

Picture this: you’ve built a perfect SOLID castle with immaculate class hierarchies, dependency injections flowing like moats, and interfaces sharper than battlements. Then reality hits - the marketing team wants dragon-shaped turrets, accounting demands a dungeon-to-cloud migration, and UX insists the drawbridge must spin like a fidget spinner. Suddenly your fortress feels more like a prison. Welcome to modern software development, where the only constant is change, and architectural rigidity is the real technical debt....

October 23, 2025 · 4 min · 752 words · Maxim Zhirnov